What Is The Subduction Zone?

Six years after the legislative abortion otherwise known as Dodd-Frank was excreted into being, its tentacles show no signs of tiring.

The latest arm-twistings of the financial sector by regulators now infesting corporate boardrooms manifest as an arbitrary failing grade for most banks for attempting to comply with the “living will” segment of Dodd-Frank, as well as rewriting the rules on how financial institutions pay their employees. This comes hard on the heels of a series of strict new “anti-inversion” tax rules laid out by the Secretary of the Treasury (a presidential appointee) on the eve of a scheduled summer recess for both houses of Congress, which must approve said rules for them to become law. These rules would give Treasury the power to arbitrarily re-define a private company’s assets and liabilities, effectively giving the government the power to rewrite corporate balance sheets.

This dog-and-pony show for the sake of sham legitimacy is SOP for Shakedown Nation, which for the past six years has used private industry as its own personal ATM. Through fines, lawsuits, or simply changing existing laws to something more accommodating, this government has squeezed private industry in general and the financial sector in particular with the methodical ruthlessness of an anaconda. All in the name of ending “too big to fail”, while actually enshrining it (in the form of Federal backstopping of “clearinghouses” used to liquidate failed financial institutions in compliance with Dodd-Frank, despite the law’s own adamant prohibition of the use of taxpayer dollars for bailouts).

The whitewashing of such blatant hypocrisy is tantamount to a current trend in the bleaching of the pelvic area immediately surrounding a key orifice which is subject to discoloration (whether from being ordinarily covered by hair, or simply from prolonged use over time). The greatest tool for deniability is legislation.

Such is the MO of this administration lo these six sad years. Given the shape of the contest between the imminent presidential contenders during Sludgefeast ’16, there are no signs of hope that the executive branch’s bastardization of law will be checked.